Much progress has been made to improve the efficiency of executing database operations. Common database operations include join operations and aggregate operations. Such operations happen to be some of the most complex database operations that are supported by commercial database management systems. Thus, the performance of a database management system depends, to a large extent, on the performance of the execution of these two operations. There is an almost constant desire to improve the performance of join and aggregate operations by introducing new algorithms and optimizations.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.